Absent Fathers and the Rise of Patriarchal Religion

Many of us are missing fathers in our lives.  This absence creates a vacuum that some try to fill with things like drugs, work, or religion.  In the case of religion, some of the western ones refer to God as the Father, not to mention the rabbis of Judaism and the priests of Christianity being referred to as fathers.  Feminists might interpret this as baseless sexism, but there is a better explanation, which also accounts for why men are the only ones conditioned to be priests and rabbis. 

We call God the Holy Father and priests fathers because generally more fathering is needed in our lives.  Fathers are far more likely than mothers to be absent to us as children.  This can be seen from the fact that mothers often get custody of the child in the event of a separation.  Other fathers are forced to fight for their country in the event of a war, or travel out of the country on business.  Indeed, many fathers are still in our lives, but some are never around to give us the support we need. 

The metaphor translates well to the Jesus story, in which Christ laments about being forsaken on the cross by God.  Many of us feel the same way about fathers who left us to confront the difficulties of life on our own.  Perhaps ironically, we are persuaded by Christianity to replace such fathers with a figurative one who also abandoned his child. 

The need for having a father figure in our lives is strong enough that we use it to assign an all-powerful being the same responsibility.  Instead of a man watching over us, helping us through our problems, picking us up when we’ve fallen down, it’s God or a priest who takes on the role.  Interestingly, this collective psychology is less common in the east, perhaps because fathers stay around longer on average.  There, the spiritual replacement is usually "master" instead of “father”, which also has a masculine connotation. 

This isn't meant to justify the oppression of patriarchal religions over matriarchal ones.  It’s only meant to serve as a metaphor for explaining the transference of parenthood to priesthood; an unconscious, archetypal movement starting around 1,000 BC that took the focus away from matriarchal goddess religions.  Considering this, I think it’s safe to assume that the rise of warfare, commerce, and exploration around this period is proportional to the rise of patriarchal religions.  They were the only public institutions that offered a refuge for those whose fathers left in one way or another.